The high desert was still the cool temperature of early morning when Liv climbed out of the excavated chamber which had become her living quarters. She thrust the curtain of canvas which served as her door aside, and then paused to hold it out of the way for her cousin, Miina.

“Thank you for acting as my squire,” Liv told her, once they were out into the sunshine. She was wearing her enchanted boots, her refurbished armor, complete with helm, and the stormwand on her hip. Even the jewelry she’d won on the beach at Freeport glittered in the sun on her left hand.

“Don’t Lucanian queens have ladies-in-waiting?” Miina asked, with a grin on her face. “I’d rather be a lady than a squire.”

“Too fancy by half,” Wren said, from where she leaned against the rock face next to Ghveris. Arjun was there as well, and Kaija, along with all twenty of the men and women in matching armor who now served as Liv’s personal bodyguards.

“The troops have been arranged?” Liv asked Ghveris. It had been his suggestion, after all, so she’d only thought it appropriate he speak to the various commanders.

“A squad of ten each from every Elden House,” the war-machine rumbled. “None from Whitehill. Seventy soldiers all told, in addition to your guard.”

“Good.” Liv nodded, and turned to Kaija. “Every member of the guard is ready to head into a rift?”

The armorer nodded. “We’ve been working with them. Anyone who is in danger of pushing past what’s safe will be used to set up a fallback point or a perimeter.”

Liv wasn’t completely satisfied with that answer, but she also didn’t want to openly cast doubt on the efforts of the men and women who’d devoted themselves to protecting her. She kept a neutral face and simply nodded, then set off toward the entrance which led into the ruins. The entire group tromped through the halls and corridors together until they reached the waystone chamber. As they approached, they found Elden warriors lined up along the walls, grouped by their House of origin.

“The stone we’re going to is a lot bigger than this one,” Wren said, as they squeezed past the waiting soldiers.

“Well, we’re going to see how many people we can fit for the first wave,” Liv said.

Her father was waiting outside the door to the waystone. “You have everything you need?” Valtteri asked. As he wouldn’t be travelling to any of the rifts himself, he wasn’t wearing his armor. They’d all learned quickly that the mid-day heat of the high desert made that impossible.

Liv nodded. “Everything I need, and plenty of people,” she assured him. “Honestly, this is more than I’ve ever taken into a rift before. Usually there’s perhaps half a dozen of us.” She tried not to think of the fact that Keri and Rose should have been with her. Even Sidonie, who she’d left to help Keri in Whitehill, would have thrown herself into studying any fragment of Vædic magic they could find.

“I’ll get out of your way, then,” her father said. “This is going to be cramped enough without people you don’t need.” He reached out to embrace her, for a moment, and Liv returned the motion. After a quick squeeze, he turned around and headed down the corridor.

Liv looked over her companions. Ghveris probably had the loudest voice, but – “I want you on the waystone first,” she told the war-machine. “We’ll pack everyone we can in around you, until we run out of room. Wren, can you organize everyone out here?”

“Figured I had the next loudest voice?” the huntress asked.

The fact that she smiled when she said it eased a bit of the tension that had accumulated in Liv’s chest over the past few days. She hoped that it meant everything was back to normal between them. “Something like that.” Liv clapped Wren on the shoulder as she moved into the room, leaving her friend out in the hall.

The waystone at Feic Seria was neither large enough to ship goods in quantity – Liv had no idea what might have been produced in the high desert, in the first place – nor as small as the personal waystones they’d found in the Well of Bones or the Tomb of Celris. If she had to guess, she would have said that Staivis, the long-dead Lord of Stone, hadn’t wanted to bother with two waystones, and had instead compromised.

The result was a white circle fifteen feet across, which Liv wasn’t confident would be able to handle everyone she was bringing in a single trip. Wren had already pointed out which sigil led to the crystal rift; this once, they’d be able to take advantage of the work that the Cult of Ractia had already put in.

Liv’s first instinct was to stand above the sigil herself, but that wasn’t the plan. Instead, she waited for Ghveris to position himself in the exact center of the waystone, and then she stood in front of him, facing the doorway. Kaija, Arjun, and Miina filled in around her, and then the twenty members of her personal guard, followed by ten warriors each from House Däivi and House Syvä. It was just like Wren to make the decision to surround Liv with the most trustworthy soldiers, and Liv couldn’t really blame her.

That left the troops from Houses Bælris, Iravata, Keria, Asuris and Kalleis to fill in around the outer span of the stone as best they could. Everyone pressed in tighter and tighter, until Liv’s back was mashed against Ghveris’s enchanted steel torso. It made her grateful for her own armor, which provided a bit of protection. She worried a bit for how Arjun was getting by: he was the only member of the group now wearing anything heavier than padded cloth.

“Alright, the six of you are going to have to wait,” Wren shouted over the noise. “Back into the hall, and follow us as quick as you can.” A moment later, a small bat winged over the crushed mass of people and landed on Ghveris’s left pauldron – which was Liv’s cue.

“Listen up!” she shouted in Vakansa, channeling the attitude she’d used when setting her class of students at Coral Bay on their morning run. The voices subsided to hardly more than a murmur, though the occasional curse from one of the people squeezed onto the stone still floated up from the crowd.

“Wren says the stone we’re arriving on is twice the size of this one,” Liv continued. “It’s supposed to be on top of a hill, at the edge of the rift. As soon as we get there, everyone needs to be ready to fight. Expect war-machines, bats, soldiers, maybe even a wyrm or two. They’re going to see the stone light up, and know that someone is coming, but with any luck, they won’t know who. Don’t give them any more time to react. Accept a surrender if it's offered, but don’t put yourself at risk to do so. Understood?’

A general chorus of affirmative noise answered her, and Kaija took over. “Jari, Saana, send us over.” The two elden members of Liv’s personal guard who’d taken their places over the sigil – and who’d been hemmed in by other soldiers crowding over where they crouched – began to feed mana to the waystone. Liv, and everyone else, could tell the moment it happened, because the familiar light began to build.

There’d been some question as to whether Ractia had closed off the rifts under her control to outside waystones, as Liv had done at Bald Peak. When the topic had been raised, however, Wren had rather firmly insisted they had nothing to worry about.

“Once she was at Nightfall Peak, she never left,” the huntress had declared. “She was like a spider in her nest. She never went back to any of those rifts herself. I don’t think she considered them important enough to bother with - not in that way.”

Liv had a different thought – that with how tied the Vædim were to rifts, that Ractia might simply have feared to trap herself. There was an outside chance that she would end up in some far flung part of the world she hadn’t counted on – Liv certainly hadn’t known that she would go to the high desert one day, when she’d been growing up in Whitehill. And in the event the goddess found herself somewhere unexpected, in desperate straits, she might one day regret closing off parts of the waystone network. Liv wasn’t certain the thought would ever had occurred to her, if she hadn’t started to worry about the same things.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

The white light built around them to a blinding glare, and Liv closed her eyes. She had just enough time to grip the handle of her wand tight in her right hand, and then the world was torn apart.

☙

An eternity in darkness, peaceful and serene, gave way to hot, damp air, with the fresh taste that lingered where many plants and trees grew all together. A single shaft of sunlight fell down at an angle through the opening in the jungle canopy overhead. As Wren had described, the waystone here was at least thirty feet across, and had resisted any attempt by roots or vines to intrude upon the ground it occupied. Though the boughs of the surrounding trees stretched out into the open space, they could not quite cover it completely.

The Elden soldiers around Liv began to tumble outward, the ranks furthest from her first, as the warriors sought breathing room and space to draw their weapons. Immediately, the staccato bark of shoulder-mounted Antrian weapons cracked out through the jungle morning, followed by screams.

Liv needed to see what was happening desperately, and nearly cast a spell to give herself wings. Instead, following her own plan, she trusted those around her to deal with any threats, and woke Cei in the back of her mind.

Like Luc and Dā, the word of dreams had suffered from Liv’s lack of time. She’d been given it by Master Grenfell in the wake of her escape from Coral Bay during the winter, and been careening from one fight to the next ever since. Aside from using it to ease her friends’ sleep here and there, and the horrific experience of being pulled into a dream-prison by Geneveive Arundell, Liv hadn’t even come close to exploring the word’s possibilities.

And yet, she was the only one present who had it at all. She might have sent Bryn Grenfell – at least, she was fairly certain the other woman had been given the word by Guildmistress Every, though Liv might not have ever gotten around to actually asking. But Bryn would have been imprinted even more recently, and Liv needed both her and Brom at the floating tower rift.

So it was that she found herself in the position of having to close her eyes, ignore the battle taking place around her, and reach out to feel for – something. What, precisely, that would be, Liv wasn’t even certain.

Every word of power contained, in her experience, a sensory component. Even when one was not using the word actively, to create a spell, it was possible to use it to feel out the immediate area – almost as if every word was an additional sense, meant to compliment taste, touch, hearing, sight and smell. With Aluth, she could feel sources of mana, and with Cel, Liv had been able to sense the minute crystals of ice as far away as the clouds in the sky. Now, she sought something that would resonate with the word of dreams.

Wren had described a crystal, half-buried in the jungle floor, as thick around as a tree trunk. What Liv ended up finding was, in fact, even larger than that. She could feel that the crystal extended at least as far down into the ground as if did into the air, and that it had spawned an entire cluster of subordinate, smaller crystals, whose very tops only just poked up out of the dirt near the main body of the thing.

Aluth showed her how it was rooted in a vein of mana-stone that ran beneath the ground – part of a small network that connected to the waystone, as expected, but also stretched out for miles in every direction, branching into successively smaller branches. It reminded Liv like nothing so much as the system of veins and arteries that spread throughout a human body - and the drawing Master Cushing had once showed her, when she’d first been learning anatomy from the old Chirurgeon.

The veins of mana stone drew power from ancient roads and pathways, each built from enchanted bricks that used Savel to convert sunlight into magic power, which was then fed into the mana stone network. There were wheels in the nearby stream, a tributary which must eventually meet the Airaduinë, and as the current pushed them to spin, that force was collected as well. Other enchantments, stretching out beneath what must have once been fields, used Cer to ensure a bountiful crop. Long ago, before the Vædim had been overthrown, the entire area must have been farmland, used to grow mana-rich crops.

Now, however, Liv could feel the damage to the mana stone system. There were half a dozen or more places where entire branches had been broken off; in one area, the ground had collapsed into one of the cenotes that dotted the jungle in the wake of the destruction of Corsteris.

The crystal was the only thing that didn’t fit, until its purpose finally became clear to Liv. She opened her eyes and turned to the left, unable to keep a scowl from her face. “I know where it is,” she told Kaija. “Follow me.”

Half a dozen guards fell into formation around her, forming a rough circle that surrounded Liv much like the ring of the Vædim surrounded the world. Arjun walked at her side, and Miina, but Wren and Ghveris had taken the lead in pushing back Ractia’s forces. Liv picked her way through the spaces cleared between the great jungle trees, stepping around the fruits and vegetables the cultists had been growing at the rift: avocados, tomatoes, peppers, melons, potatoes and beans. They must have been taking advantage of the ancient enchantments – the ones which were still working, at any rate – to send food back to Nightfall Peak.

All around her, the cultists were fighting desperately – and losing. There, Ghveris split an Antrian war machine in half with a single swipe of his enchanted arm-blade, the runes shining a baleful red. Not far from where the juggernaut was fighting, Wren changed shape in midair, the knives that Jurian had given her opening the neck of a Iravatan warrior before she flickered back into her bat form and flew away. The cultist’s neck gushed blood and he fell to his knees.

Shards of ice, whipping vines, blasts of burning light, and enchanted weapons carved through the force that Ractia had left to hold the rift. Half a dozen Antrians were scattered across the jungle floor, their shattered and broken armor smoking. Chains of pure darkness erupted from the shadow of a tree, wrapped themselves around one of the mercenaries in Lucanian armor, and bound him so tightly that he couldn’t move. It was the first time that Liv had seen the magic of House Asuris used in battle, and she had to admit it was impressive.

It was a surreal feeling – every other time Liv had gone to fight in a rift, she’d actually done her share of the fighting. Now, as she made her way to the crystal, winding between stands of trees, any cultist who got within twenty feet of her was cut down by one of her guards. The last enemy Antrian let loose with a cascade of shots in her general direction, but a wall of ice sprang into existence to absorb the impact – and Liv wasn’t even the one who’d cast it.

Finally, she stepped around the trunk of a tree that was wide enough to carve a mineshaft through, and confronted the crystal. It was a beautiful thing, even if the purpose to which it had been turned was utterly evil. Every shade of sunset, of open sea and verdant forest, shimmered across the smooth surface of the crystal. Tiny Vædic sigils looked to have somehow been etched beneath the surface, in complex, winding strands.

Liv stopped at arm’s length from the main crystal, just at the very edge of where she could stand without letting her boots touch the subsidiary cluster of crystals that grew around the core. She reached up to remove her helm, but Kaija grabbed her by the arm.

“You can’t take your helm off on a battlefield,” the armorer scolded her. “One of those war machines just shot at you. The Iravatans could have bows. Someone could throw a dagger!”

“I need to use the crown,” Liv explained, and looked to Miina. Her cousin dug about in her bag, and came up with the silver circlet.

“Can you use it without wearing it?” Kaija suggested. “Or at least give them a moment to finish up. Once we’ve captured all the cultists, then you can take the helm off.”

Liv smiled. “Alright, I can wait. But I want to destroy this thing as soon as I can.”

“Destroy it?” Arjun asked. “You don’t want to study it?”

“No.” Liv shook her head. “I don’t want anyone copying something like this. It’s vile.” She reached one hand out, and then hesitated to actually touch the thing. “There are two enchantments here, both intended to affect everyone for miles around – all of the human farmers who would have worked here. The first one is simple enough: all it does is put them all to sleep at the same time, every night, and keep them asleep until dawn. A measure to prevent slaves meeting in secret to plan anything, I imagine.”

Her companions frowned, and even some of the guards glanced in her direction, the only sign that they were listening. Liv doubted that any of them could have pieced together the entirety of the enchantment by scanning the runes: it would have taken her hours or days of work, without the instinctive understanding the word of dreams had granted her.

“I could see the use in an enchantment like that in healing,” Arjun admitted. “The other piece?”

“That’s the truly twisted magic,” Liv explained. “It actually feeds on dreams. Takes everything hopeful, or happy, and leeches it away to be converted into mana. And in the place of those dreams, it sends visions of all the horror that comes of defying the old gods. Every night their slaves slept here, they would see their loved ones killed, the most hideous things done to their own bodies. Over and over again, to teach them the price of disobedience.”